Talking about toothaches is pretty much guaranteed to make me curl up in a ball and make pitiful noises, like guys do when they see someone on TV get hit in the balls. I once had a botched root canal abscess, and since I’d recently moved, I didn’t have a new dentist other than the one who’d screwed up my tooth in the first place, so when the pain manifested itself at 2 a.m., I had no one to call. I took every kind of painkiller we had in the house. I chewed ice cubes. I begged Mr. A to pull my tooth out with pliers. I started seeing things. It felt like an ice pick inside my face trying to force its way out. Just typing it out right now is making my jaw twinge.

We called three emergency rooms, all of which did not have a dentist on duty. Call your dentist, they urged, like I’d be on their line if that was an option. I finally did call the quack, whose emergency line was an answering machine, probably in her garage.

Glitter rained down from the sky today at the Minnesota State Fair as activists sprinkled sparkles onto the Minnesota for Marriage booth and participants shouted, “Where’s our booth?! Equality for all.”

Today is Monday, September 5, 2011. Since it is the first Monday of September, it is the national holiday known as Labor Day. Supposedly, it is the day when our politicians and pundits proclaim their unrelenting love for all things worker related – even as they spend the other 364 days a year doing all in their power to destroy the lives of workers by cutting salaries, limiting benefits. Just today, the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson had a column decrying the state of labor in the US:

In under four minutes, Andrew David Watson’s short film There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books takes us into the world of New York City bookseller Michael Seidenberg who moved his secondhand bookstore from a storefront to his apartment, creating a literary speakeasy, a secret bookstore where people browse and meander through the stacks and shelves, caressing, discussing, buying the volumes. At the same time, the film also explores the changing face of the urban landscape where independent businesses are squeezed out; and the losses we face as our ways of learning and leisure shift.

On the National Organization for Marriage’s blog, NOM president Brian Brown is raising a fuss about a disastrous debate he had on the Fox Network show Stossel two weeks ago.

Brown’s biggest adversary wasn’t the person he was debating, David Haryansi, but host John Stossel and the audience. And this week, Stossel continued to criticize Brown’s argument and performance in a column.

In a speech in Detroit tailored to the union audience, President Obama paid respect to the need for a strong American labor movement as a lever to move families into the middle class. He also previewed his jobs address coming on Thursday to a joint session of Congress, highlighting steps like “rebuilding roads and bridges,” which could put 1 million unemployed construction workers back on the job.

The ECB basically threatened to slow down or stop its purchases of Italian debt if the austerity programs aren’t put into place, which would raise borrowing costs for Italy to unsustainable levels.

The stark realities of the American economy show the political and economic elites sending the country in the wrong direction, destroying the strongest economy and world history. The American people know better and could rule better than the elites. It is time for Americans to organize and mobilize to take power, http://october2011.org.

Though the recent deals on freezing discretionary non-security spending and 2011 appropriations and the debt limit didn’t reduce spending by a tremendous amount in the short-term, the accumulation of all of these deals, along with the fading out of stimulus measures from 2009 and 2010, has made fiscal policy contractionary, despite 9% unemployment.

If you don’t know the history of Labor Day, you should. This is a pretty good run-down of the events leading up to its founding.